The brilliance of Better Call Saul's storytelling
And the lessons you can apply to your own, no matter who or where you are.
(WARNING: SPOILERS)
I have never been so proud to be so completely wrong about something as I am about how the final episodes of this incredible final season of Better Call Saul would go down:
OK, so I was right about defending himself in court. But in hindsight, I think I’d have been disappointed if any of these other predictions came out true.
I’m going to miss this show dearly. Like its predecessor Breaking Bad this was one of the best-written television shows of the last 20 years, if not ever. And just like its predecessor, you fell in love with all of its quirky characters, major and minor, making this whole Breaking Bad universe such an imperative part of our lives.
Best of all, the writers understood that resolution is death, which is why they left the door open a crack with the way they decided to end the show — a staple of this universe.
In Breaking Bad, we assume Walt is dying on the floor as the police enter, but we don’t actually see him die, just smiling and laughing as the screen fades. Thirty years of storytelling instincts says to pay attention to that detail.
In the final scene of Better Call Saul, Kim and Saul light up a cigarette in his cell, like old times’ sake, and Saul mentions he could get out earlier than his 86-year sentence “with good behavior”. Remember, this guy had a deal for seven years at the goal line before he decided to throw a pick-six. And Jesse Pinkman’s up in middle of nowhere Alaska under an assumed identity. What’s to say this is the end?
Why leave out the possibility of… ugh, dammit, now this is going to haunt me for years!
I don’t care if Vince Gilligan says he’s done with the universe he created after 15 years. Doesn’t AMC want another spin-off?
OK, before I get too off track. This truly was some of the best writing that’s ever been done in television. It’s at the very least a masterclass in storytelling, full of lessons that any of us can apply to storytelling in whatever we do.
Obviously, you have to create characters that are worth rooting for, good or bad. But how you move those characters up and down the chessboard is just as critical. With that said, anybody looking to be a better storyteller in their career can learn many a thing or two about how a good process works.
Here are the biggest lessons you should take away from this wonderful show:
Stephen King’s “Kill Your Darlings” rule
In Stephen King’s On Writing, the horror master’s iconic memoir on the craft of writing, one of his most important lessons is about being willing to cut copy you’re in love with for the sake of pace:
Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings).
Two of the most important characters from the cartel storyline, the mole Ignacio “Nacho” Varga and the villainous Eduardo “Lalo” Salamanca, met their demise surprisingly early in the final season.
When we started this season, half of the New Mexico court system thought Lalo was dead. But by the events of Breaking Bad, Saul appears to think Lalo is still alive. This was a tricky juxtaposition to maneuver, because theoretically it leaves an opening for a possibly weird resolution, where Lalo could be alive by Breaking Bad in some complicated way that would too be hard to believe. How could Lalo possibly lurk in the shadows throughout Breaking Bad with Gus openly at war with the rest of the Salamanca family?
The solution was to focus on making sure the fear of Lalo lived on more than the character, like some sort of boogeyman going bump in the night. And ultimately that was the right call.
Would it have been great to have Nacho and Lalo around for a few more episodes? Sure, but what would they have done to keep the plot moving? There were still three other major storylines to sew up.
Great villains are what separates good shows from great. By the end of season five, Lalo became one of the most terrifying villains in television history. He was the best part of the show. But by killing him off earlier than expected, the writers opened up possibilities the audience (and maybe even themselves) never saw coming.
You’re lying if you say you saw Gene Takavic getting found out by a 78-year-old grandmother searching AskJeeves.
Focus on the “two inches in front of your face”
This “only seeing two inches in front of your face” approach Vince Gilligan has talked about time and again is a really important point about storytelling, and why they’ve been able to keep the plot so fresh and unpredictable.
Planning is obviously important. You need to have some basic framework to your creative project or else you just end up playing avant-garde noise to an audience of 10. But by not setting long-term expectations, by going into this final season reportedly with no idea how it should end, they removed as many creative barriers on a story that had a lot already working against them (Saul, Gus, Mike all have to survive, etc).
By saying “this is where we start,” but not “this is where we have to be by season six,” they removed as many assumptions as they could how this story should be told. Which is how you end up with the mid-season confrontation that the writers said “broke this series wide open” and took it in a direction nobody saw coming.
Once again, “kill your darlings” in play here.
Another benefit to the two inches in front of your face is you double down on the details. The charm of this universe is that for all the lengths they go to to nail realism, it’s still zany. But if you get the details right, you can convince your audience of anything.
Because they got you to believe Saul knew a guy who goes to prison for you for money, they got you to believe a straight-and-narrow fast food chain manager was secretly running the largest meth empire in the Southwestern United States and warring with a Mexican drug cartel.
Because they got you to believe a lawyer as brilliant as Chuck McGill had an aversion to electronics, they made you believe Mike Ehrmantraut could recruit a crew of German engineers to build a meth superlab underneath an industrial laundromat on the outskirts of Albuquerque.
The “two inches in front of your face” approach means they didn’t waste any ingredient at their disposal. Every camera angle, every detail, was designed to add tension to a scene. By the time Saul and Kim light up a cigarette in that final scene, you can’t argue there’s really any loose ends left to tie up, or that you’ve been cheated.
Be intentional with how you promote
With any brand you build, self-organization is always the golden goose. What makes the Better Call Saul fan community so fun to be a part of is a shared desire to solve the puzzle. Sticking with the “two inches in front of your face” theme, Better Call Saul’s writers decided that the way their future episodes traditionally got teased was a wasted opportunity to take their audience further into the corn maze.
Every TV show that’s ever existed teases scenes from the next episode by showing snippets of a couple dramatic scenes. For the second half of this season, the producers turned this practice on its head, bleeding out an establishing shot of a vacant setting with no characters on screen, voiced over with dialogue that ultimately did not match up with the setting. None of these were more than 15-30 seconds, and were done almost entirely in grayscale — which in this universe is supposed to represent the Gene Takavic timeline.
Or so we assumed. These scenes are in black and white, but are most definitely from either the Saul/Jimmy or Breaking Bad timelines:
The dialogue here is from the Gene Takavic timeline, after the mall shoplifting scheme is complete and Gene tells Jeff “we’re done”. But what you’re seeing is in color, which suggests it’s from the Better Call Saul timeline:
My first reaction was, did Mike Ehrmantraut bail out Saul, and now he’s reached his breaking point and wants nothing to do with him?
And this one here…yeah, I could have made guesses all day, but you’re lying if you saw the scheme coming based off this out of order clip:
This was all intentional. The producers clearly loved how much fun we were all having trying to piece together the story, and they wanted to have fun right along with us by throwing in some variables. The dialogue not matching up to the scenes, and the scenes not always matching up to the timelines, forced you to drop assumptions and re-imagine how this was all going to end.
Have respect for your audience
Hat tip to my coworker Charlie Stephan for this salient observation.
In storytelling, it’s as tempting to over-simplify things for your audience as it is to over-complicate things just to prove how smart you are. The answer is somewhere in between. Give the audience some credit. Let them connect a few dots, and then let them make their own lines and patterns from those dots. If they see your work and feel like they’re solving the puzzle or getting it in ways that others might not, there is an instant connection to the universe you’re creating. When the audience feels like they’re part of the solution, they’re along for the ride.
But here’s the kicker. The actual writing, and the actual decisions on where the plot goes, are just one or two steps smarter and better thought-out than any audience theory out there, leaving us all wondering how they thought of that when just a few minutes prior we thought we had it figured out.
Perhaps this is why Vince Gilligan was so giddy when declaring at mid-season that he’d heard all the theories and was proud to say none of them are true. The goal of the story was simple: transform Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman. How they got there, it could truly have gone a million different ways. And anyone watching it felt smart enough to take the ride.